


The Dark Circus

by SherlockWho



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: BAMF!Mary, Baby Watson, Case Fic, Character Death, Disfigurement, Eventual Johnlock, F/M, M/M, Scary Clowns, Seriously this is going to be a lot of scary, Terrified children, Torture, Vivisections, abductions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-11 03:30:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1168135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SherlockWho/pseuds/SherlockWho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surgeons have gone missing from St. Bart's.  Children have gone missing from their schools and beds.  Sherlock, John, and Mary are just beginning to join the dots between the crimes when one abduction too many makes it personal.  Will they be able to save the life that matters most to all three of them?</p><p>**WARNINGS: scary situations involving scalpels, scary clowns, and terrified children.  If any of these triggers bother you, please don't read.</p><p>There will be something of a happy ending.  Eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Where Did They Go?

Sally Donovan wasn’t in the habit of fooling herself anymore.  She had no aptitude for deductions and she didn’t aspire to them, not since—well.  Not for a while now.  She deferred to her betters in this, as she should.

But it didn’t mean she had to like it in her heart of hearts.  She just kept her thoughts to herself and went about her business. 

All of which is to say that she recognized that helpless darkness in Lestrade’s eyes as he reviewed the photos spread out on his desk, and she accepted what was coming next with the long-suffering stoicism of the formally reprimanded and rather publicly shamed.

 _Better this than what happened to Phillip, I guess_ , she thought and lifted her chin not in pride, but acceptance.

Lestrade sighed gustily and shrugged.  He cast a defiant glance at her.  “I’ve got to call him,” he said.

She gave him a tight-lipped smile and nodded.  She fought against her still-impressive dislike of the Freak—of _Sherlock_ —and sighed.  They did need help, and they needed it quickly.  Too many in too short a time span.  The stress was starting to affect them all.

Greg pressed his thumb over the contact photo on his phone of the _consulting detective_ wearing that damned hat—what had they been thinking, buying that for him?—and she heard right away an excited squawking on the other end of the line.

“Oi, Sherlock,” Greg said, pulling the phone away from his ear to minimize the damage to his eardrums from the sheer volume.  The further the phone got from his ear the deeper Sally’s flinch grew until she was simply scowling at the offending screech transmitted through the mobile.  “Sherlock!” Greg shouted.

She listened intently, wondering if someone was being butchered and actively keeping herself from speculating that the Psychopath was responsible.  “What is that?” she finally asked when she heard a woman scream.

“Sherlock!” Greg shouted again.  He bent his head to the phone and tried to decipher something like the English language from all the noise.  Then Sally’s jaw dropped when Greg started _nodding_. 

“You understand any of that?” she asked incredulously.

“You, shut it,” he said to her, stabbing a finger at her like it was a dagger.  “Sherlock, I’ll be right there.”

She very clearly heard Sherlock Holmes’s response as Greg activated his speaker phone: _“We don’t need your damned help, Lestrade!”_

Then she heard another scream, quite probably from the same woman.  “Fuck,” she whispered.

“Sherlock, listen to me—keep her breathing until I get there.”

Sally started to feel true alarm.  “Attempted murder?” she asked.

_“Oh, thanks so much. Not like I don’t have a bloody doctor right here, Gavin.”_

“Greg.”

 _“The Detective Inspector wants you to breathe.”_   The sarcasm was thick and almost offensive, all things considered.

“Smart arse,” Greg said with a smile that did something lovely to his face.  It put Sally off her stride a bit.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

_“Greg, it might be a while before we’re ready for visitors, but when you can come find us—maternity, St. Bart’s.  Gotta dash.”_

“Oh,” Sally sighed, and she wondered if her own smile was as lovely as Greg’s.  She hoped so, because the engine that drove it was her admiration for the invalided army doctor who had redeemed a psychopath so quickly that she hadn’t recognized the effect until it was too late.

Greg was already striding to the elevators leading out of NSY.  “Grab the file, Donovan,” he barked.  “I’ll pull the panda up front.”

“We’re taking this?” she asked, casting her eyes across the messy desk at the photos—oh, God, the photos.

Greg’s ghoulish smile was all the answer she needed.

 

* * *

 

“You hear about them missing kids?”

Corinne turned to look at the man standing beside her.  She grimaced.  This was hardly appropriate pre-dinner conversation.  “Not now, Frank.”

“It’s just—if it was my kid—“

“I know.”  Corinne couldn’t help but think about her own children, Jack and Kate.  “You really know how to kill a mood, don’t you?”

Frank only shook his head.  Corinne returned her attention to the serving line at the front of the conference room.  It was a silly ritual, this.  She was the head of the winning department, sure; they’d raised more money to support the KinderCure Foundation than their rivals on the next floor down, but what was a wager between surgeons?  And why was she so reluctant to discuss the story flooding the news with Frank; why not indulge in a little gallows talk while you were waiting to be served a dinner of naan and chicken tikka masala? 

Even so, something seemed . . .off.  Something was wrong.  She frowned and took another look around the room.  “Where is everybody?”

Frank hummed a question in reply, then seemed to come out of his hungry daze. “Hmm?  Everybody?”

Corinne narrowed her eyes.  “Parvati, Spencer, Louise?”

Frank seemed to come around as she mentioned Louise Parker, the new scrub nurse belonging to the losing team.  He cast his eyes around the conference room.  It was rather eerie now that they were paying attention; the food was set up on warming trays, the aroma drifting about and causing the chuckling, smug winning team to salivate . . .

But where were the servers?

Corinne reached out a hand and snagged the sleeve of one of her oldest colleagues, a cardiologist trainer named Mike Stamford.  “Mike, where is everyone?”

Mike’s rosy cheeks nearly glowed with good humour.  “I’d be offended, Rinnie, but I think—“

“Mike!” Corinne’s eyes were wide as she conducted yet another head count of the people milling about the room.  The surgeons were growing impatient now and asking impatient questions: _“Do we just get started then?” “It’s going to go off if we wait much longer.” “Where are the plates?”_

“What is it?” he asked, his jolly demeanor hardening into something far more grave.  “What’s wrong?”

“There were fifteen in this room just ten minutes ago,” Corinne answered, pulling her mobile from her coat pocket with a shaking hand.

Mike and Frank scanned the room quickly, their lips moving silently as they counted.  “Twelve,” Mike said softly.

“Will?  Where are the kids?” Corinne asked into her phone.  “Check on them.  Check!”

Mike was pulling out his own mobile and placing his own phone call.  His grim smile did nothing to reassure Corinne. 

And while Corinne was finding out her own awful truth, she was missing the fact that Mike was lowering his voice and saying, “Sherlock, there’s trouble.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m not going to hold her.”

“You have to.”

“I—no.  It would be far more advisable if I did not.”

“You’re to be her godfather, Sherlock.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and again surveyed the creamy-skinned creature wrapped in pink fluff and resting comfortably in her father’s arms.  “Setting aside the construct that being anyone’s _god_ parent is anything more significant than establishing extended family—can’t you see, John?  I am already fulfilling my duties in the role.  I’m protecting her from—“

John extended his arms and deposited his daughter neatly in the cradle presented by Sherlock’s wild flapping.  “There.  You tit.”

Sherlock blinked.  She was so _light_ , barely a presence at all.  He straightened and blinked again.  _Mustn’t look.  Bonding happens when you look.  Don’t look._

He looked.

Elizabeth Caroline Watson gazed up at him with her father’s deep sapphire eyes and smiled.

 _Not a smile_ , he corrected himself emphatically.  _Possibly a nervous twitch or indeed, that old assertion of an escaped pocket of gas . . ._

She smiled up at him again and seemed to give him a look he’d seen often enough on John’s face: patient exasperation.  Then she closed her eyes.

_Closed eyes.  Trust._

“Well?  What do you think?” John asked.

Sherlock pressed his lips into a tight line.  He didn’t express those thoughts that made him vulnerable, and what he was thinking now made him very vulnerable indeed.  The truth was damning, because he wanted to give back to John what John had given him dozens of times over the span of their acquaintance; he wanted to give him a wide smile and say, “Amazing.”  Because _this_ , this beautiful child who’d stared up at him with John’s eyes and John’s forbearance and had smiled at him and accepted him enough to drift off to sleep in his arms—well.  If that wasn’t amazing then nothing in the world deserved the word.  Not even him.

“I think that for being two weeks overdue your child is very likely not developmentally challenged,” Sherlock said.  “I also think she’s destined to be left-handed and possibly either socially awkward or outright . . .charming.”

“Yeah,” John said.  Sherlock shifted his gaze from the infant he was cradling to his best friend and saw some sort of strong emotion on the doctor’s face.  “Socially awkward.  Yeah.”

“I am hoping for the latter,” Sherlock said.  He tried to extend his arms without disturbing her and gave up.  “For her sake.”

“Give her back now, husband.”

Sherlock turned ( _slowly, slowly, mustn’t wake the child_ ) and looked down at Mary Watson, reclined on her post-partum bed.  She was smiling at him, the smile of a former intelligence agent and sharpshooter turned wife and mother—in other words, an insufferably smug and self-satisfied smile.  A warm flush of affection washed through his system at the sight of her, the woman who had given John a reason to smile and laugh and live when that sham death of his had done so much harm.  She was a good friend and a fierce ally in his lifelong mission to keep John alive and happy.  He gave her a tight smile and dipped his chin, indicating the child.  “Good job.”

“Thanks.  Now give her back.”

“Don’t want to wake her.”

“She’ll sleep again.”

“It’s very selfish of you.”

“Sherlock,” John said, that hint of a chuckle in his voice. 

Sherlock was starting to feel anxious.  He really did think it would be a good idea to return the baby to her parents, but . . .how?  How to hand her over without jostling her or waking her or making her the littlest bit uncomfortable?  Because little Elizabeth ( _Bessie? Beth?  Eliza?_ ) deserved her sleep.  She’d been through so much trauma in the past twelve hours—wouldn’t it be kinder, better, more godfatherly if he defended her right to rest?

“Give her over,” John said softly.  “I know you don’t want to wake her.  Here.”

John insinuated his arms through Sherlock’s own, snaking around with fingers and forearms until he had formed a secondary crèche for his daughter’s form.  Sherlock averted his eyes.  It didn’t happen often, these accidental intimacies, but they happened often enough that he was always on guard against a word or a look or a caress betraying him.  John wasn’t so much of an idiot that he could be forever and always oblivious, naturally.  Vigilance was the only option.

“Okay, now let go,” John said.

 _Never_ was the word Sherlock bit back.  A vocabulary of words just like it, a wealth of words backed up in his throat.  He scowled instead and worked his arms free of John’s entanglement.

He wanted to say something glib, something offhand and dismissive of this whole unsettling and ridiculous experience—but his phone buzzed in his pocket.  Just as well, of course.  Very likely whatever he was to say would have been nonsensical, trite, or incomprehensible.

Or, perhaps, all three.

He nodded at Mary and left the room, turning his considerable focus to his caller with no small measure of relief.  “Mike.”

 

 

 


	2. Is It Him?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It wasn’t Sherlock’s fault. It wasn’t John’s fault. It wasn’t her fault. And that’s what made it so hard to take. They were all three victims of circumstance and fate, locked together as they were in this dangerous dance.

Lestrade was staring at him again, and John didn’t appreciate it.  He was tired, and it was far more than just the standard, to-be-expected new father sort of tired.  He didn’t want to be this tired, but he had added the duties of a Sleuth Assistant to New Father and, as a result, he hadn’t slept in forty eight hours.

Well, there was the micro-sleep he’d had as he was taking the elevator up to the conference room in the Cardiology unit, but that was nowhere near enough.

“What?” he finally snapped at the Detective Inspector. 

Lestrade only smiled at him.  “It looks good on you.”

John blinked, hard.  He wasn’t sure he hadn’t just dipped into another split-second kip.  “ _What_?”

“Fatherhood.  It looks good on you.”

John heard Sherlock heave a gusty sigh from a nearby table.  He turned to his best friend.  The fluorescents of the conference room had cast an almost ghastly pallor over his skin.  Well, it would have been ghastly on just about anyone else.  John was sure he looked rather awful.  On Sherlock, however . . .it almost magnified his otherworldliness. 

John shook his head.  “I need to sleep,” he muttered, his voice hoarse.

Sherlock let out an abrupt huff and rose to his feet.  “So, we have missing doctors.”  Sherlock looked around the room.  The dinner had been cleared away, but the smell of curry and lentils remained.  “Surgeons,” Sherlock amended as his eyes rapidly ticked through a series of deductions.  “Five missing.”

“That’s not why I rang you,” Lestrade said, but he didn’t say it to stop Sherlock.  It almost seemed an aside to himself to stay focused.

“I know,” Sherlock said softly, and John could hear the strain in his voice.  It had been a shock to Sherlock to see the photos of the missing children; the three of them had been so preoccupied with monitoring Mary’s labor that they had become completely oblivious to the news.  In retrospect John should have been more alarmed by this than he had been.  Sherlock did not miss the news; he was always tapping away on his iPhone or rifling through the papers, scavenging for something to keep his infernal brain busy.

 _We’d become that for him_ , John realized, then sat back and smiled at himself.  _Is this why he goes so often without sleep?  I feel rather like a genius myself, with all this thinking and such._

He caught Sherlock’s gaze.  His friend was wearing a wry, almost sarcastic smirk, and John wondered again if he’d become a mind-reader.

“So what then?  Are you saying the missing doctors are related?”

Sherlock hummed thoughtfully and steepled his fingers under his chin.  “Not sure.  Five missing surgeons, five missing children.  I’ve heard all my life that the universe is rarely so lazy as to produce coincidences.”

John frowned.  “So that means . . .?”

Sherlock shrugged.  “Possibly nothing.”

“Is it him?” Lestrade asked.

Sherlock cocked an eyebrow.  “Who?”

“You know who.”

It had been a month since Sherlock’s dramatic return—not _that_ Return, the one he’d staged so dramatically two years after his _magic trick_ of a suicide.  The other return, the one that only took place five minutes from the departure.  And oh, that departure; John had been locked in a paroxysm of regret and shame and angst over his wasted chance to say something interesting, amusing, touching . . . _meaningful_.  He hadn’t been able to speak a word, and it had been horrid, those five minutes, that span of silence filled with the things he hadn’t said, couldn’t say.

And the reason for such a quick return?  The resurrected spectre of Jim Moriarty. 

 _Nobody stays dead in this world_ , John mused.  _Not Sherlock, not Moriarty—hell, Irene Adler is probably still alive somewhere._

But Moriarty hadn’t fully risen.  Certainly there had been menacing hints of him, things that indicated he was still around somehow, electronic serpents twisting through intelligence networks or the sound of scuttering spiders and whispers just beyond hearing in the halls of justice.  There were shadows everywhere, and people lived under them in fear.

Sherlock only shrugged in response to Lestrade’s question.  He didn’t like not knowing and, when it came to the threat of Moriarty, his ignorance was enormously unsettling.

“I know you’re going to need to work through this,” Lestrade said.  John returned his attention to the Detective Inspector and was alarmed to realize he hadn’t seen the man’s face, not really.  He was a walking corpse.  “Just—“

“You know my methods, Grant.”

“Greg.”

Sherlock waved a couple of fingers at Lestrade dismissively.  “Yes, right.  I will need some time.”

“The hospital staff has been advised to answer your questions,” Lestrade said, heaving himself out of the chair he’d collapsed into.  It seemed to be a considerable effort.  “Sherlock, please—“

“Yes, fine, goodbye,” Sherlock said.

Lestrade sighed and turned to John. John nodded.  “I’ll tell him to hurry.”

Sherlock snorted.  “Much good as it will do you.”

Lestrade grimaced, turned, and left.  It was only once he’d gone that John could see clearly what Sherlock had been struggling to hide.

 

He was terrified.

_Two weeks later_

Mary woke.  There was no gap, no slow dawn of consciousness.  One moment she was asleep and the next she was awake.  That was the price she’d paid for the life she’d led, and it was a price she’d continue to pay for the rest of this new life of hers.

Overall, it was a life worth the price paid.

She frowned.  She had a wonderful life, yes.  She was married to a gorgeous man, she had a job to which she’d be glad to return, and she had a beautiful daughter, asleep in the crib near her bed. 

If there was a fly in the ointment, it was personified by a rather tall, awkward man with an odd name and an even odder brain.

She sighed and closed her eyes.  _Sherlock Holmes._

It wasn’t Sherlock’s fault.  It wasn’t John’s fault.  It wasn’t her fault.  And that’s what made it so hard to take.  They were all three victims of circumstance and fate, locked together as they were in this dangerous dance. 

And only she was aware there was any music playing, let alone a dance going on.

But there was music, sure enough.  It was the music of John’s erotic whispers during their lovemaking, the whispers that veered away from his candid appreciation of her skin to more abstract sentiments: _“I missed you so, you may not leave me again, I won’t let you, you must stay with me, I can’t be without you, I don’t know how to be without you . . ._

_“Oh Sherlock.”_

It was the sound of his terrified nightmares, the sands of Afghanistan giving way to the gritty grey asphalt of St. Bart’s: _“Sherlock no, don’t, please.  You don’t know.  I never said . . .”_

She always woke him before he could finish the sentence.  She could take a lot of things; she’d taken them, sure enough.  She’d been threatened, tortured, shot, and even separated from her husband while he sorted through his feelings for five months, living at Baker Street again while she lived alone, coming together only to work or attend ultrasound appointments but nothing really said.  Yes, that had been worse than having been shot, and that had been bloody awful.

But hearing John finish that choked, strangled sentence would be worse by far than living without him had been.

She could not blame him.  He didn’t know his own heart, and it wasn’t her place to show it to him, not now that they had a child together and had to figure out a future for that precious life.  There may never be a good time for her to show him what he’d never be able to see for himself.

So she would have to bear this burden alone.

That was alright, she decided.  If anyone could bear it, she could.  And she could bear it in silence.  Silence had been her whole world before she’d met John and had the sound and the motion turned up again.  So she would bear this music and this dance and be glad of it, because that silence and stillness was far, far worse.

Speaking of silence—why wasn’t her daughter wailing at her to be fed, or changed, or coddled?

Dread fell over her like a shadow.  She turned her face away from her analysis of the man sleeping next to her.  Her eyes fell on the crib.

The empty crib.

And again, Mary’s silence was shattered . . .but this time it was by her own desperate wail.


	3. The Cipher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He stood in John and Mary’s bedroom and stared at the open crib. It was incomprehensible and thoroughly wrong. The child should be there; she was always there, gazing up at him with those impatient eyes, wanting to be held and delighting in the sound of his voice. She wasn’t there, and she wasn’t in the arms of either her weeping mother or her distraught father.

Sherlock’s goddaughter was missing.

It was all he could think about.  He’d spent the last two weeks indulging in that most human of errors; he’d been a near-constant guest in the Watson home, watching the baby, marking her development, comparing that development against established norms, and conducting a wide range of experiments on range of motion, cognitive function, rate of waste production, and both the rate of consumption as well as the varied components of the nourishments she was consuming.  He’d even gone so far as to implement menu plans for Mary, insisting that a small change in her diet would make an enormous difference to Elizabeth ( _Bets? Betty? Liz?_ ).  Mary finally put her foot down when he tried to make her eat a custom-made mushroom and chocolate omelet.

And now she was gone.

He stood in John and Mary’s bedroom and stared at the open crib.  It was incomprehensible and thoroughly wrong.  The child should _be there_ ; she was always there, gazing up at him with those impatient eyes, wanting to be held and delighting in the sound of his voice.  She wasn’t there, and she wasn’t in the arms of either her weeping mother or her distraught father.

This was wrong.

He spun where he stood, wrestling his control back into place.  _Focus.  Narrow it down.  Observe.  Deduce.  Stop being an idiot and_ concentrate.  He took two deep, shuddering breaths and closed his eyes, clearing his mind.

_Not Elizabeth.  Another child.  Find the child._

_“Solve the case!”_ John’s voice crowed in his mind.  _“Solve it!”_

He opened his eyes and refocused.  Yes, just a room, a collection of furnishings and collectibles, random and impersonal to him.  The crib stood like a monolith, the center of attention.  Even detached from his regard it was ghastly.

He slipped on his gloves and began rooting in the crib bedding, the fleece swaddling and baby-soft pillows redolent of gentle soap and milk and mildness.  There had to be something; nobody breaks into a flat and abducts an infant without leaving some sign, something . . .

He pulled something from beneath a neatly-folded corner of the bedding.  It was a piece of black paper neatly folded into a black lotus.

Sherlock’s jaw dropped.  “John!”

And John was there.  “Find somethi—” He stopped speaking abruptly and fixed his eyes on the scrap of paper.  “But that’s—”

“Not possible,” Sherlock agreed.  He turned the paper over, studying it closely and comparing it in his mind to the lotus he’d found in his pocket after he’d been strangled in a long-dead woman’s flat.

“But Sherlock,” John said, his voice starting to hit the unique timbre he only used during a building panic, “those were left on _dead people_.”

“Yes, they were,” Sherlock said, pinching the flower between two of his fingers and turning to face his friend.  John was trembling and his eyes were shining with unshed tears.  Sherlock placed a calming hand on his shoulder and squeezed.  “But this wasn’t placed on a dead baby.  It was placed in a missing baby’s crib.”  He took a deep breath and tried to transmit his preternatural calm to John.  “I need you, John.”

John’s eyes snapped up to Sherlock’s face.  He pressed his lips together and blinked, hard, evicting those tears from his eyes and sending them sliding down his face.  He nodded sharply.  “Right.  So what is it, then?”

Sherlock removed his hand from John’s shoulder and said, “Let’s find out.”  He cast another careful glare around the room—no fingerprints, shoe prints, moved furniture—and relocated to the kitchen.

Mary was sat at the table there, her head in her hands.  Her shoulders were shaking gently.  The worst of her wailing was over—at least for now. 

Sherlock sat across from her and placed the paper flower on the table.  She lifted her head from her hands and he watched her refocus her considerable and deadly energy; it was a little like watching a snake become aware of nearby prey.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“You’ve read John’s blog,” Sherlock answered simply.

“I didn’t write anything about the flowers, Sherlock.”

“You didn’t?  Hmm.  I didn’t notice.”

John frowned and returned his attention to his wife.  “The smuggling organization, the Blind Banker?  They left these, er, mementos I suppose, with each of their victims.”

“Victims?” Mary asked, nearly surgical in the way she cut to the heart of the issue.

Sherlock sighed.  He admired her intelligence, but she was missing an even more salient point.  “But this wasn’t left with a victim, was it?” he asked, glaring at the both of them.  “It was left behind in the bedding.  Listen, both of you, I need you to work under the same assumption I’m holding, that your daughter was taken as a lure.”

“Fine,” Mary said, her voice full of gravel and broken glass, rough from crying and sharp with determination.  “Tell me what needs doing and I’ll do it, but understand we don’t have time for you to be a smart arse.  What does this thing mean?”

Sherlock pulled out his magnifier and snapped it open.  “Light,” he said, and John produced a lamp with a telescoping arm.  Sherlock brought it down close over the origami flower and let his gaze sweep over the item.  Compared to the memory he held of the flower that had been left in his pocket, there were definite differences; the creases weren’t as precise, for instance.  Some had obviously been folded more than once.  The paper wasn’t as fine, either, which perhaps led to the multiple creases.  And finally—

Sherlock slowly, carefully unfolded the flower.  At the first level he found marks made in yellow pencil, almost the same color as that old spray paint—but the marks weren’t Chinese characters or numbers.  They were simple block letters, but they were arranged in a pattern that made no sense:

zr mc rp jr cu ce ht ai tx pz

Sherlock scowled at the nearly-random pairs of letters, but he knew this wouldn’t be all.  There was more.  He continued to unfold the origami until he had it completely unfolded. Taped to the center of the black scrap was a small memory chip.  He tore it from the paper and strode over to John’s laptop and shoved the micro drive into the appropriate port.

The screen flickered once, then a too-familiar face filled the screen.  Moriarty’s voice seemed to have been auto-tuned, but the message was clear:

_Thought I’d just tell you where she is? That would be playing fair, Sherlock. I’m not playing anymore._

Sherlock blinked as the message began to repeat: _Thought I’d just tell you where she is? That would be playing fair, Sherlock. I’m not playing anymore._

The phrase reverberated through his mind palace, sparking recognition and memory: _That would be playing fair. I’m not playing anymore. That would be playing fair. I’m not playing anymore._

 _Irene Adler_ , he thought to himself.  He remembered her taunts from the meeting with her and Mycroft, the deals that were almost struck there and the near-complete humiliation he felt.  Did this have something to do with her?

It couldn’t.  She wouldn’t.  The game with her was over; why would she return, and in this way?  What would be her motive?

He shook his head.  Moriarty’s face grinned relentlessly at him.  He was in the middle of this, of course.  Had he found her?  Was he using her against him as he had before?  It wasn’t out of character, surely, but . . .

“Something’s not right,” Sherlock said to himself.  He turned to find John and Mary staring at the laptop screen, stunned and scared.  The expression hurt his heart.  _Must distract him_ , he thought to himself.  “John, what do you make of that message?” he asked.

John shook his head.  “I dunno—code?  It must be a code, a—what did you call it—cipher?”

“Yes, certainly, but how is it a cipher, and for what?”

John was trying; Sherlock could tell he was trying to marshal his strength and stubbornness, but it had been a very long night and day and the fatigue was wearing on him.  He closed his eyes and sighed.  “Moriarty.  Is this it, then?  How he comes back?”

Mary stood abruptly from where she’d been crouched over the laptop and returned to the table.  “The code—fold the paper again.”

Sherlock turned to her.  It was as if he’d been trapped in a smoke-filled room all day and she’d breathed fresh air into his face.  “Yes,” he said simply.  He also returned to the table and carefully refolded the paper.  Again the message in yellow pencil appeared:

zr mc rp jr cu ce ht ai tx pz

“It’s a cipher for that,” Mary said.

“But how?” Sherlock growled.

Mary sighed gustily and grabbed her own laptop.  “Amateurs,” she said, typing quickly with trembling hands.  “It’s in the message: Playfair.  It’s the playfair cipher.  We just have to figure out what the keyword is and we’ll get this thing cracked.”

Sherlock turned his attention back to John, whose stare was alternating between Sherlock and Mary.  The exhausted smile on John’s face filled Sherlock’s chest with warmth.  “It’s rather intimidating, you know?” John said with a chuckle.  “Being in the same room with two certifiable geniuses.”

For the first time Sherlock genuinely doubted he was the superior genius in the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I've given you the cipher and the coded message; can you solve it before I post the next chapter? ;)


	4. The Tears of a Clown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Not now!” Sherlock hissed. He wanted to shout, to scream away the intrusion into the soft center of him, the vulnerable place at the very core of him, but he didn’t want to call John’s attention to this unexpected row. “Your daughter is missing, Mrs. Watson, and I’m your best chance at getting her back. Why on earth would you think we could interrupt that process with a completely pointless exercise—”
> 
> “But it isn’t, is it?” Mary asked. “You can’t concentrate because it’s too personal, and it’s too personal because…”
> 
> Sherlock returned his attention to her and watched as her face changed, as a deep current of pain let itself be seen. “Because what?”
> 
> “Because you love him.”

 

_Now there's some sad things known to man_

_But ain't too much sadder than the tears of a clown_

_When there's no one around_

~“The Tears of a Clown,” by Smokey Robinson

 

Corinne woke, feeling sluggish and disoriented.  Her face was completely numb, and that should have been alarming . . .but she was completely incapable of being alarmed.  That, too, should have been alarming, because—

Her mind stopped cold.  Nope.  There were no more thoughts there.  A solid steel door stood between her and anything that could hurt her.

She opened her eyes in an attempt to gain her bearings, but her vision was blurred and distorted.  She again was aware how strange it was that she wasn’t scared.  Normal people would be scared, terrified even.

 _But not you_ , came a strange, high-pitched singsong voice in her mind.  _You’re always fun, Rinnie.  You smile and dance and make others laugh, and that makes you happy._

 _Yes_ , she sighed through numb lips, contented in the image she held in her mind of dancing and singing to a group of laughing children.  _Yes, that’s me.  Children love me._

She tried to smile and found it an unnaturally easy thing to do.  Maybe she’d been smiling all along?  Even in her sleep?  Yes, that fit, she realised as she tried to frown.  She couldn’t frown. Why would she have to?  There was no pain and no fear, not anywhere in the world, and children loved her so very much.  They should.  She loved them, too.

“Wakey wakey,” said that same sweet, familiar voice, the voice of a dear friend.  “You awake, Rinnie?  I know you are.”

She wanted to answer, but her throat was thick.  It almost felt plugged.

“You’ve been through so much,” her friend said, moving closer.  “But we have work to do, Rinnie.  We have so much work to do.  I need your help—and you’ll help me, won’t you, Rinnie?”

“Nnggh,” she answered around the clog in her throat.  Of course she would.  She would do anything for him.

“Of course you will,” he crooned.  Was it an Irish accent?  It was so unique, the way he spoke.  It was merry and concerned and a bit—well.  A bit mad, if she was being honest, and naturally she was being honest.  Rinnie was always honest.

“Rrrngh mmungh,” she mumbled.

“Yes, I’ll help you up, lovie,” he said, and she felt his hands on her arms.  A sharp jolt of something—was it pain?—shot through her, one brittle spike of it like a slap to both sides of her face.  She flinched.

The voice drifted closer to her ears.  “Oh, no no no, we can’t have any of that, can we?”  Something nearby clicked, and a wash of ease and comfort flowed through her.  She wanted to sob with relief.  “There we are,” he cooed.  “I’ll always take care of you, Rinnie.  I’m your friend!  And friends do things for each other, don’t they?”

“Mmm,” she hummed.

“Good.  Then you’ll help me get ready for our last clown,” he said softly.  “I’ve left him a little puzzle, but he’s a clever one, is our Sherlock.  He’ll come, I know he will.  And we have to be ready.  We’ll make him just like you, dear, and then we’ll all be one big happy.”

That . . .sounded a bit off.  Like her?  Make him just like her?  What was she like?  And how did that happen?  “Lnnnk . . .mmm?” she mumbled.

The voice was so soft.  She wished she could see his face, but he remained just out of sight.  All she could see was an exquisitely tailored suit—and now, a mirror.  She blinked a few times, trying to clear the fog and fuzziness from the edges of her vision.

Her face—was this right?  It had to be right.  She was a clown, so yes, this was right: the wide, red grin, the bunched cheeks, the frizzed bright red curls that flopped into her eyes, the white skin and brightly-colored makeup at her cheeks and eyelids.  She shook off the thought that she was actually dark-skinned and dark-haired; just the remainders of a dream, surely.  This was her.

She was a clown.

“Mmm,” she hummed dully.  Yes, this was her, but she didn’t want to see the mirror anymore.  On some level she thought her dream-self was a bit prettier than this clown, but also sadder for some reason.  It was better to be the clown.  Better by far.  She closed her eyes.

“We will make him just like you,” the voice whispered.  “Come now, Rinnie.  There are so many kids waiting on you now.  Come play.”

 

* * *

 

“So were you ever going to tell him?”

Sherlock had been lost in a fever of observation and analysis.  Piccadilly Circus always left him nearly catatonic with it; it was an effort to distance himself, to pull away from the need to find patterns and determine approaches.  The fever was worse now, of course.  No matter how he tried to distance himself emotionally from what he was trying to consider A Case, the damnable _sentiment_ kept creeping back in.  Everything from the pain in John’s eyes to the memory of Elizabeth’s little fist wrapped around his right index finger made him jumpy and anxious.  It was foreign to him, and he didn’t like it.

So Mary’s question caught him quite a bit off guard.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know what she was talking about; he knew immediately and felt the impact of the question like a punch to the gut.  Things were stressful enough as it was.  He didn’t need her to broach conversation that they’d mutually agreed never to broach, even if the agreement was, like the subject matter, never said. 

He gave her a reproachful glare, then swept his face around to find John.  It was his turn to answer some of Lestrade’s questions, and he’d stepped about six yards away to take the call.  The Met was all over the Watsons’ flat now, their forensic crews searching for clues that didn’t exist.  If Sherlock couldn’t find them, what chance did Anderson’s replacement have?

“He can’t hear us,” she said.  “We can talk.”

“Not about this,” Sherlock said, his voice clipped.

“We have to.”

He turned away from her.  “I do not have any interest in going down whatever path—”

“We _have_ to,” Mary repeated.

“Not now!” Sherlock hissed.  He wanted to shout, to scream away the intrusion into the soft center of him, the vulnerable place at the very core of him, but he didn’t want to call John’s attention to this unexpected row.  “Your daughter is missing, Mrs. Watson, and I’m your best chance at getting her back.  Why on earth would you think we could interrupt that process with a completely pointless exercise—”

“But it isn’t, is it?” Mary asked.  “You can’t concentrate because it’s too personal, and it’s too personal because…”

Sherlock returned his attention to her and watched as her face changed, as a deep current of pain let itself be seen.  “Because what?”

“Because you love him.”

Sherlock grimaced and found John again.  Strange, how he always seemed to know where he was.  Ever since the bonfire incident Sherlock couldn’t bear not knowing.  After the wedding, during the two-week honeymoon and the accompanying complete absence of text messages and phone calls with his blogger, Sherlock had descended into a haze of cocaine and heroin to blank his mind of the pressure and stress.  Ironically it had grown marginally easier once he’d discovered what Mary Watson really was and how aware she was and how incredibly proficient with her gun she was—even more so than John—but it was never really easy.  One part of his mind bore the weight of always needing to know.

“Sherlock, I don’t care, alright?  Let’s just get that out there.  I’d suspected from the first time John wept over you that it was never an innocent _bromance_ or whatever people call these things.  I don’t think you ever crossed the line, but that’s rather my point, isn’t it?  Ever since you’ve come back you’ve been distracted, not the same as what I’ve read in his blog—”

“That’s your mistake, it’s a blog, Mary, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t interrupt me.  I don’t care about anything right now but that my daughter is safe and sound.  You and John need each other, and I know that, don’t I?  Haven’t I supported that from the beginning?”

Sherlock gave her a sharp nod.

“You’re my friend, too, but if your affection for John is going to cripple you then I’d rather you left us to do this on our own.”

And that was like a cold slap in the face.  Evicted from a case for _sentiment_?  That was ridiculous.  It was unthinkable.  It had never happened.  He’d been evicted before, twice that he could think of right away, but those instances were over either being high as a kite or too rude to bear.

She was right, of course.  Mary Watson was cold steel in this moment, incisive as a scalpel, and she’d cut to the quick of him and held up his own weakness for his inspection.  There was no blame or condescension, just a righteous insistence that if he could not contribute to the solution he stay out of the way.

He shook himself loose.  John was returning, his mobile held loosely in his palm.  He was wearing his affable, easy-going smile, but his eyes were still broken and screaming for relief from his own fears. 

“Greg’s about to pack it in,” John said and shoved his phone back in his pocket.  “Said that lot couldn’t find their arses in the bread aisle at Tesco, whatever that means.  I can never tell what they’re doing; nothing but chaos, like a disorganised circus.”

Sherlock blinked.  Letters rose before his eyes, the cipher flashing like a warning:

_zr mc rp jr cu ce ht ai tx pz_

The keyword had been, of course, _Moriarty_ , and that word ran through the nonsensical letters, rearranging them and creating order out of chaos:

_Waiting at the circus_

“Not Piccadilly,” he breathed, re-engaging John’s deep blue gaze.

“What?” John asked.

“What do you mean?” Mary asked.

“It’s not Piccadilly,” Sherlock said, pulling his own phone from the pocket of his Belstaff and pulling up the current map of London.  “Stupid! I always assume people will try to hide in plain sight, and Jim was fond of Piccadilly Circus, wasn’t he?  But children!  The key was the children!”

“What are you talking about?” John asked as he and Mary struggled to keep up with Sherlock’s long, hurried strides.

“Circus!” Mary cried.  “He’s talking about a circus!  John—acrobats and elephants and clowns!”

“Oh,” John said, and then he took Mary’s hand in his and they were running, positively sprinting in the wake of Sherlock’s swirling coat.


	5. The Dark Circus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock would think back to this day in the years to come and knew that this was the exact moment that Mary gave it all up for lost. He saw it in her eyes, in the way her gaze went from warm and grateful for his words to hard, cold steel at the sound of John's. And no matter the grief the thought caused him, he never, ever shared it with John. It became his burden to bear alone.

They had pinned all their hopes on a hunch.

John leaned up against the wall of the alley, watching as Sherlock thumbed through his collection of lock picks to find the one that would let them into this abandoned building.  Mary had her illegal firearm—a matched set, the two of them with their illegal guns—in hand, safety off, her sharp eyes scanning the entrances to the alley for trouble.

A hunch. Everything hinged on that rarest of creatures: a hunch from Sherlock Holmes.

Because Sherlock Holmes did not trade in hunches.  He observed, he deduced, and he very clearly, if impatiently, outlined his deductions so people could understand the science . . .and be dazzled by his brilliance, those who were smart enough.  Unfortunately the world had been, for the most part, slow and plodding and had not given him his due.

John turned his face to Sherlock's profile as he worked the lock loose with the chosen pick.  His eyebrows were furrowed in concentration and his upper lip was curled in towards the lower one, just a bit, another sign of his focus.  It was as it always was with Sherlock, however; the man's eyes were glowing.  Perhaps the arc sodium lamps lining the alley cast their light in just the right way.  How often did the lighting have to favor Sherlock, though?  It wasn't the practice of a fair and just God for that kind of thing to happen all the time.  No matter the cause, the glow of those eyes did what they always did; they intrigued him and drew him to Sherlock and to all the awful impossibilities he made incarnate.

He absent-mindedly tapped the small of his back, a nervous gesture performed to reassure him that his Sig was still comfortable in its place.  It was.

Sherlock was staring at him, John knew.  He'd worked the door open by now and he was waiting to be assured that John and Mary were also ready.  John turned to him and asked, "So you've brought us all the way here on a hunch."

Sherlock bobbled his head a bit.  "Not so much a hunch as balance of probabilities, and in this clutch situation I'm both barrister and judge."

"Will you tell me?"

Sherlock gave him a warm but dangerous look, all sharp angles and lava.  "As I always do, John, at the right time."

John nodded and pulled his piece, and together with his bride followed Sherlock into the dark and the danger.

* * *

The smell was of age and dust and a spot or two of mold, but mostly the smell was redolent of the theatre: wax paints, often-mended cloth, and the lingering traces of cigarette smoke.  Sherlock shook these things from his regard and pushed past the detritus of a long dead circus dressing room.

"Sherlock!" Mary hissed from behind him.

"What?" he spat, turning on her.  His blood seemed to be singing with certainty: _She's here, Elizabeth's here, get her, save her._

"Disguises," Mary said, motioning back to the racks of costumes behind her.

Sherlock's frown of exasperation gave way to a glowing form of approval.  He could really get used to having _two_ conductors of light.

Even so, it wouldn't do.  "Unless you can find something in there that will make us invisible, disguises won't help us.  We're expected; why else would they take Elizabeth?  No, we come as ourselves."

They left the dressing room and turned right, following the increased lighting down an interior hall.  The lights were almost garish now and Sherlock was positively assaulted by the input: the chipped linoleum flooring, the shattered glass of lighting fixtures, and the pitted paint made everything seem razor-sharp. 

 _My goddaughter is in this_ , Sherlock thought, and a muscle in his jaw twitched.

"Sherlock!" John hissed from behind him.

"What now?" Sherlock asked and turned back to John.

"You can't just go charging ahead like that," John whispered.  "I'll take point."

"I don't think so."

"You don't."

"No."

"And why not?"

"Because you're a _father_ , John.  She needs you."  Sherlock cut his eyes up and caught Mary's gaze.  "They both need you."

John grimaced and took one of Sherlock's coat-clad arms in his hand.  "And I need you."

Sherlock would think back to this day in the years to come and knew that this was the exact moment that Mary gave it all up for lost.  He saw it in her eyes, in the way her gaze went from warm and grateful for his words to hard, cold steel at the sound of John's.  And no matter the grief the thought caused him, he never, ever shared it with John.  It became his burden to bear alone.

No matter what was in her heart or her head, she shoved past both of them and took the point position, moving swiftly ahead before either of them could marshal an objection.  The smell of fearful and anxious animals, from elephants to lions to horses, filled his mind and he realized they were moving out to one of the stage areas—one of the rings of the circus.  The light coming from that space was even more glaring. 

But the sound—it was nightmarish.  There was no other word for it.  He could hear children, but they weren't laughing.  They were screaming and crying.

It was Bedlam.

* * *

Mary knew.

Of course she knew.  As soon as John had mentioned a circus, as soon as Sherlock had connected those dots, she saw it all.  The memory was as clear as a high-definition movie playing behind her eyes.

_She had been young, new to the CIA, a hotshot sniper who was just smart enough to get ahead of her senior partner.  She'd flashed her credentials and strode through the circus, large as bloody life and twice as terrifying with a rifle loaded and braced on her right shoulder.  Her right eye peered down the scope at the scene around her: the children with their cotton candy, mouths agape in her wake; the shrieking parents yanking those stunned kiddies behind snack bars; the circus officials, confused and agitated and desperate to save their own skins.  The speakers crackled to life and she grinned as she listened to the broadcast warnings._

Let them warn him _, she thought to herself as she made her way through._ Let them tell him.  It won't save him.  This story is written.

_She found him where she expected to find him, in the ring, literally clowning around in front of an audience.  Five years this maniac had been on the run, trying to dodge the justice owed him for a string of murders across the American Midwest.  Children, all children of course, and this was how he did it, lured them from behind the white face paint, befriended them, then took them away to die._

_She shouted his real name into the carnival-music drenched surrealism before her.  He turned to her, his eyes wide, and said, "No, miss, I'm sorry.  I'm Chortles the Clown."_

_He wore a look of snide triumph on his painted face.  He had his gloved left hand wrapped around that of a child, a dark-haired boy child with a stunned smile.  The other hand reached around behind him and produced a gun._

_She didn't think twice.  She shot him once in the head.  It was a clean shot, but it wasn't a clean death, and with horror she saw the grey gristle of the man's brains on the young boy's cheek._

She had been greedy for the glory; that was always her downfall, the greed.  She had been reprimanded and reassigned, no matter the fact that she had saved a life that day.  She had been told there were probably dozens of other ways she could have saved that life, and most of them would have involved waiting on her partner.

As she stepped into the overwhelming light of this center stage, she thought she finally understood, now.  If anyone had spattered her daughter's face with  blood and bone and brains, she would be outraged.

She raised her face and squinted.

"Is that Mary Watson?" came a merry voice from a loudspeaker overhead.  "So soon!  We aren't done entertaining the children yet, Mrs. Watson.  As you can see they're enjoying the show, so you'll just have to _wait your turn_."

She was standing in a spotlight, one that had just pivoted to her from a space about ten feet in front of her.  In the center of that space stood a gurney.  Strapped down to that gurney lay a woman in a posh white dress and matching bolero jacket, both of which were now liberally streaked with blood from the incisions in her face.

 _Hardly surgical conditions_ , Mary thought to herself in horror.  Worse yet, the woman was _awake_ ; she pivoted her face to Mary and displayed the flayed skin and exposed muscle.  Her eyes were pleading: _Help me._

Looming over her were no less than three fully outfitted clowns, but their _faces_ —oh, they were horrid.  The skin had been rearranged, peeled away and reshaped into the eternal rictus of the mad.  She thought it very likely that the skin on each face had also been bleached, and that the clown makeup, different for each attendant, wasn't makeup at all but fresh tattoos.

This was all taken in and parsed down in the space of seconds, the span of one cycle of breath, even the accelerated breath she was taking.  The next breath was spent observing the children: heads thrown back, mouths open wide, and eyes closed.  In the right light and through the right pair of perspective goggles, yes, one might misunderstand the expressions for mirth and laughter—but Mary wasn't wearing those goggles.  She _observed_ , but more than that she _heard_ : screaming, wailing, moaning.  Not one laugh in the bunch.

"Stop this," she said, then heard footsteps approaching behind her.

The head attendant— _Was this what had happened to the missing surgeons_? she wondered in a mounting panic of horror—turned her face over her shoulder so Mary could see.  The woman had been dark-skinned, but now her face was bleached and tattooed with clown paint.  "The Ringmaster said wait your turn," she hissed through her gruesome grin.  "Don't make us say it again."

"Or what?" Mary asked almost playfully and lifted her gun.  It was like dancing with an old friend.

" _You!_ " cried the voice on the loudspeaker, and she heard a static buzzing sound as the loudspeaker was switched off followed by the clatter of someone running down rickety metal steps.

"My name is Mary Watson and I've come for my daughter," she said. 

"Oh, certainly you've come for your daughter," said the Ringmaster.  He approached her now in a well-cut designer suit with tails, a top hat, and a riding crop clutched tightly in his right hand.  His hair was slicked back from his face and his dark eyes were filled with the dancing light of madness.  "But you're not Mary Watson."


	6. The Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She sighed and closed her eyes, feeling the odd sensation of her face being pushed and reformed into an eternal smile. She’d seen the liability immediately when Sherlock and John had emerged into the circus. The energy between them was intact, that potent energy of words unsaid and promises unspoken. It almost made her want to laugh out loud to see how they still struggled with it, even after all this time. Men, she thought. They’re such thoroughgoing idiots.

About three years ago, Sherlock had been summoned to the morgue at St. Bart’s to identify a body.

Sherlock didn’t make mistakes about corpses.  He was almost fondly familiar with them, with the difference between a lively face at rest and a truly still face that would never move again.  Even if the face was missing, and he’d seen enough of those, thank you, he knew the difference between the look of living flesh and dead flesh and how it behaved.

So he had known almost immediately that the woman laid out before him that day was _not_ Irene Adler.  He’d known it by the slight difference in the size of the hands, the color and size of the nipples, the shade of her hair.  It had been a fairly convincing job, no doubt, but the woman he was sent to identify had not been The Woman.

Even so, he’d told the lie.  He knew Mycroft thought he could have been a scientist or philosopher, but Sherlock thought he could actually have made an amazing actor.  He’d carefully schooled every expression and given the words and corresponding actions of a startled and mildly unhappy man.  He played to the room and gave Mycroft the sociopath he was expecting.

Why?  Because he truly had cared about The Woman; it wasn’t love—he had become familiar enough with that old trap in recent days to know better and he had no space in his heart to spare to another infatuation—but he didn’t mind protecting someone who was _trying_.  There were precious few in the world who were clever, and he would not be held responsible for the damage to any of them.  If she wanted to disappear, he would help.  He thought—correctly—that she would value him more and make him a part of her future plans if he helped her.

But after saving her again in Karachi, he never expected to see her.  And he never expected to see her like this.

* * *

Sherlock emerged from the staging tunnel and into the center ring of the circus.  He blinked away the initial discomfort of the garish spotlight—irrelevant—and immediately processed the following data:

Two other hallways led away from this space on the opposite end, under the bleachers—probably the ingress and egress routes for the audience.  _Possible escape route—asset._

Children, approximately two dozen of them, arranged in the seating by height to ensure everyone had a view of what was happening under that spotlight.  _Hostages—liabilities._

Snipers ringing the top of the bleachers, their sights carefully trained on Mary and now him and John.  _Challenges—liabilities._

A stranger in a Ringmaster outfit facing off against John’s wife. _Obvious, in charge of the operation, likely a liability._

Five surgically altered people dressed as clowns standing near or bent over a still figure on a surgical table.  _Unknown if allies of the Ringmaster or pawns, could be assets._

And a woman on the table who, despite the fact that her face had been flayed open and was in the process of being rearranged, was _definitely_ Irene Adler.  _Dear God, let her be an asset.  And salvageable._

Conclusions raced through his mind at the same speed:

Missing children.

Missing surgeons.

A madman with pretenses to James Moriarty taunting Mary.

Questions were answered in lightning speed: _Madness caused by a trauma suffered as a child at a circus, perhaps at the hands of a clown but more likely in the presence of one, has a personal score to settle—why else the personal invitation in the form of Elizabeth’s abduction?—trap nearly too tight to escape from alive and definitely no latitude to escape and plan, not when so much was at stake, so have to stand our ground and use our minds._

But only one question got stuck in his mind: _How?  How had this Ringmaster mesmerised the surgeons enough to get them to_ do _this to each other, to cut and mangle and alter?  There could be no simple form of persuasion convincing enough; even if some of the children in the audience were the offspring of these five surgeons, that surely could never be enough._

There was something else, then, some kind of amplifier for suggestion, some catalyst—

HOUND.

That word appeared in his mind with all the urgency of a heart attack.  He rocked back on his heels just as John tried to shove past him and get to his wife.

All of his observations and deductions had taken less than five seconds.  He reached out and snagged John’s jacket sleeve.

“Let me go,” John said, his eyes trained on Mary’s defiant form.

“No.”

“Sherlock, I swear to Christ—“

“She’s fine, John.  She has this under control.”

John’s eyes, which had been dark with menace, cleared a bit.  Sherlock watched as his old friend tried to absorb the scene from behind his confusion.

“Ah, gentlemen!  So good of you to join us.”

Both John and Sherlock refocused onto the Ringmaster.  Yes, it was apparent that he was going for some sort of Moriarty Resemblance Award: medium stature and build, dark hair and eyes, groomed to within an inch of his life, half mad.  But this man had a softness to his face and manner that, coupled with his madness, made him just that much more dangerous.  When Moriarty wasn’t pretending to be gay or a down-on-his-luck actor, he used threats and guns to get what he wanted.  You knew what you were getting.  This man used sweetness and humour, and that was worse by far for the dishonesty.

“Where is my daughter?” John asked, his voice low and rumbling.

“Oh, goodness me, where are my manners?”  The lilting Irish affectation wobbled a bit and Sherlock heard something bland and American underneath it.  “Parvati, dear, could you bring us that baby, please?”

One of the attending surgeons turned her mangled clown’s face to the Ringmaster and her carved-in smile widened just a bit.  “Of course,” she rasped, and the words came out slurred and slow and all but incomprehensible.

Mary moved her pistol to cover the woman.  “Don’t touch my child.”

The clown called Parvati didn’t pause.  She continued down one of the far halls and moved out of sight.

“Don’t waste your efforts, my dear,” the madman in the top hat said kindly.  “They’re completely mine, all of my clowns.  They’re my friends, and they’ll do what I tell them.”

“What is it, then?” Sherlock asked.  Escape wasn’t an option, so he’d have to use his words and his mind to find a way out of this.  “How did you do it?”

“You’re the great Sherlock Holmes,” the man said, his voice dripping scorn and once again morphing into a slight American drawl.  “Figure it out.”

Sherlock’s eyes flashed down to the woman—The Woman—on the improvised operating table.  She wasn’t struggling, despite the obvious awareness in her eyes that she was being carved and disfigured.  As vain as she was, as much as she relied on her physical beauty to help her, she should by all rights be thrashing and groaning, putting up _some_ sort of resistance.  She wasn’t, she was merely blinking up at him from owlish blue eyes and a face exposed to the bone.

“A drug, obviously,” Sherlock deduced, remembering again the revelation of HOUND reverberating in his mind.  “Some calming agent, something to render your victims completely suggestible.”

“Yes, obviously,” the man sneered.  “My will  has become their will, my whim, their whim.”  He turned his face over his shoulder.  “Rinnie, how’s our patient?”

John gave a start next to him.  “That’s not—“

Sherlock nodded once.  “It is.”

“But I thought—“

“Yes, you did.”

“You never said otherwise.”

“It never came up.”

“Not the time,” Mary hissed in warning.

Another slurred voice answered the Ringmaster’s question: “Stable.  I want to put her under; she keeps looking around.”

“Probably because she knows our visitors,” the Ringmaster said.  “No anesthesia.  It would take too long.  You need to finish her up, Rinnie.  Ms. Adler can’t be left this way; it would be unseemly.”

“Left this way? Surely we have all sorts of time,” Sherlock said, deepening his voice and drawing it out to a languorous purr.

The Ringmaster’s eyes sharpened.  “The police are on their way now, aren’t they?”

Sherlock leaned his head to the side and frowned slightly.  “Well, yeah.”

John’s eyes once again moved to Sherlock’s face.  “Why do you never—“

“Call the police?” Sherlock whispered teasingly. 

“Involve me in these things?” John finished.

“Not now!” Mary said.

And then the three of them were jolted by the familiar, almost sweet sound of a baby crying.  John stiffened and Sherlock blanched—and he was reasonably certain that he could see Mary begin to breathe again.

The gruesome clown that had been a surgeon named Parvati emerged from the egress hall, a small, swaddled form in her arms.  She wasn’t looking at the wailing infant; her eyes were fixed on the Ringmaster.

“Ah, very good.  Bring her here, dear,” he cooed, and Parvati immediately obeyed, quickening her steps until she was able to lay Elizabeth in the Ringmaster’s arms.  He did look at the baby, his eyes a cruel caricature of caring and affection.  “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” he asked, meeting Mary’s desperate gaze.  Her gun had moved from him to the floor, and Sherlock watched as her thumb re-engaged the safety.  She wouldn’t dare discharge a firearm near her child.  It was perhaps the most eloquent expression of a mother’s protectiveness he’d ever seen; even in this den of vipers she wouldn’t dare.  Instead she nodded, mutely answering the Ringmaster’s question.

That was apparently not good enough.  “Isn’t she?” he roared, and Elizabeth roared back, voicing her complaint over the noise with a gusty wail.

Mary’s voice was soft and even when she answered: “She’s the most perfect thing there ever has been, and I swear on my life I _will_ get her back.”

The Ringmaster’s small smile glittered in the low light.  “I’d like to see you try.”

* * *

Irene Adler wasn’t going to make it out of this alive, and she knew it.  She’d resigned herself to it.  She didn’t really _want_ to, anyway, not with what she knew was happening to her face.  She didn’t feel pain or fear—the drug had sewn that up nicely—but she would again once it was out of her system, and she was just weak enough to not want to be alive for that.

_At least I got to see him again before it was all over._

So she was left to counting her own assets and liabilities, as Sherlock had instructed her to do all that time ago when he’d put her on a plane to New York City and instructed her to start again: _“But for God’s sake, under the radar this time, if you don’t mind.”_   She had done what he’d asked, mostly, and she’d been having a great time when she’d met Horatio Bryce.  He’d tempted her to play the old game again and he’d used the promise of making it irresistible to Sherlock to seal her fate.

 _If I’d known how he’d do it_ , she thought ruefully as two of the surgeons carefully moved her head until she was no longer able to see Sherlock.  _If I’d known . . ._

She cut off the thought.  _Assets and liabilities_ , she thought again to refocus herself.  Of course Sherlock Holmes was an asset, as was John Watson and this dangerous woman he’d married.  But—the oldest liability of them all was still present, and it wasn’t the snipers or the children.

She sighed and closed her eyes, feeling the odd sensation of her face being pushed and reformed into an eternal smile.  She’d seen the liability immediately when Sherlock and John had emerged into the circus.  The energy between them was intact, that potent energy of words unsaid and promises unspoken.  It almost made her want to laugh out loud to see how they still struggled with it, even after all this time.  _Men_ , she thought.  _They’re such thoroughgoing idiots._

The liability, of course, was that their love for each other made them volatile and unpredictable.  Mary’s priorities were clear: mother, then wife, then friend, and she would act accordingly to save life in that order.  But John?  It was very likely it would be the child first, but after that his priorities were hazy.  And Sherlock’s were also a bit unclear; she’d seen his reaction to the sound of the infant’s voice. 

This would take a smarter woman than Irene was to figure out, and her brain was half submerged already in a drug that would soon make her as mindless as the rest of these monstrous clowns.

 _But before I go under, Sherlock, I promise you I will find a way to get you out of this_ , she vowed _,_ then used her mind and started to scream.

 


End file.
